Re: Unethical?

Already pulling Skype for Asterisk

Days after Ballmer said "We will continue to support non-Microsoft platforms because it's fundamental to the value proposition of communications," we see the first non-Windows version getting pulled. Any bets on which one's next?

Rule #3

History is full of cases where three-letter agencies or their equivalents have worked out how to crack what were believed to be state of the art encryption schemes. There's a reason for that too - that's their job. If they're doing it properly the first we'll know about it is when the documents are eventually declassified.

Not quite

A competent user may want to change the default password, or even the username, but Siemens explicitly say not to because it will break things. In my book that would probably be enough to take them off the purchasing shortlist.

Named after more Bond-featured tech?

Phoronix did those tests

They compared default installs of Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04 on an Asus Eee 1201N and a Lenovo T61, and Windows won every time. The original Aspire One needed a number of manual tweaks to save power if you weren't using the Acer-supplied distro, and I suspect the same is true if these.

Even h264 is vulnerable

MPEG-LA don't necessarily hold all the essential patents for h264. A submarine could surface at any time, and we've seen it before with JPEG, WiFi and even h264. Forgent Networks sued Apple and 30 others over a patent on JPEG, and CSIRO took on Buffalo and others over a patent covering WiFi among other things. AT&T went after h264 users, including Apple. Forgent's patent was rejected after PubPat presented undisclosed prior art to USPTO, but CSIRO and AT&T are still collecting royalties. In each case the patent pool failed to offer the 'certainty' claimed. Next we'll be hearing about the certain uncertainty versus the uncertain uncertainty...

Obviously?

binary blobs

Pandora, BeagleBoard, n900 and so on are using a TI OMAP chip with the powerVR graphics core. They need a binary-only driver if you want the accelerated graphics to work, but so far TI seem reasonably serious about keeping it available and up to date, which is nice but sadly rather unusual.

More common is a mess like the intel driver previously mentioned, or broadcom's adsl driver, used in modems like the dg834gt, that only works if you're using an ancient (2.6.8?) kernel version. The intel case is particularly sad because the rest of their recent graphics support in linux is open.

N900

The N900 is likely to ship with the next iteration of Maemo which currently has no phone stack. I would guess they're more likely to use oFono than freesmartphone.org for the phone stack since oFono is an Intel/Nokia project. However it is likely the community will include freesmartphone.org support. It is on the todo list for those running this on Openmoko hardware:

http://wiki.maemo.org/Mer/Hardware/Freerunner

There's no reason Android wouldn't be able to run on the N900, and if Nokia don't do it someone else will. That's the beauty of having an open device.